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Functional silos can be dysfunctional

OSS are often delivered into large organisational structures, structures that are functionally siloed. For large OSS, even the OSS team can have multiple functional silos.

Where there are functional silos, there are activities within OSS that need to be delivered across silos. That’s where things can get a bit dysfunctional. Jurisdictions, ownership of responsibilities, agreements on approach, misalignments of performance indicators, downstream impacts and dare I say it, turf wars, can make it more difficult to deliver an OSS organisationally than technically… and OSS can be incredibly difficult to deliver from a technical perspective.

Organisational change management is often completely overlooked, or only brought to bear far too late in the delivery process. Often there are so much dysfunction between silos, even where each silo has the best of intentions, that a bigger change management accord needs to be invoked.

These include:

A burning platform – communicating the need for urgent, radical changes brought about by dire circumstances

A moon shot – focussing the attention of the entire organisation on incredibly ambitious challenge

Dictatorship of decision making rather than democracy

Alternatively, insert any other method to help ensure all members of the team, across all silos, have a clear understanding of the greater objectives the team is trying to meet. I’d love to hear of examples that you’ve invoked to get great team results on complex OSS projects (or any other project type for that matter).